KeyShield SSO saves time for staff and students at Coleg Sir Gâr
Staff, students and the IT team are all enjoying the efficiencies of ‘single sign-on’.
With 1,000 staff, 10,000 students and 5 campuses across Carmarthenshire, Coleg Sir Gâr is one the largest education providers in Wales. Its 15-strong IT team has a challenging task, not only to keep the College’s multiple IT systems running smoothly but also to ensure users can easily access the services they need.
Infrastructure and requirements
The College runs a variety of systems:
- Business critical systems (student records and HR) on Oracle databases;
- eDirectory and a wide range of Novell and NetIQ products such as ZENworks, Access Manager, GroupWise, Identity Management, and iPrint, on a VMware infrastructure;
- Web-based applications, accessed through NetIQ Access Manager.
The College was keen to ensure seamless user access across multiple applications; firstly to improve user efficiency, and also to prevent wasted IT time due to login problems, often caused by forgotten passwords.
Implementing KeyShield SSO
Having worked with BCNS on a number of previous projects the College was happy for us to advise them on the best solution. As it happened, they were already aware of KeyShield SSO, so our recommendation was reassuring. They were given a demonstration of the system before going ahead with full implementation in spring 2013.
KeyShield SSO took about a month to deploy with three of the College’s development team working on KeyShield SSO in conjunction with the College’s portal system. Changing the authentication for live sites was the only challenge, but aside from some minor caching issues the implementation was smooth. The developers at KeyShield provided the College with support and training.
A time-saving success
KeyShield SSO is now successfully integrated in key areas and is reaping benefits, being described as “fantastic” by the IT support team. All relevant links to web applications are now in one place, easy to access; and login problems have also reduced, making it a success with staff and students too.
If you are looking for a solution that will reduce your IT helpdesk calls and provide a single sign-on solution for the organisation, KeyShield SSO is the way to go. Users can go about their business in a more efficient manner without too much effort from IT support. Gone are the days of users having to remember multiple usernames and passwords. The implementation of KeyShield SSO as a single sign-on solution has been fantastic.”
Stuart Thomas, Computer Services Manager, Coleg Sir Gâr